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vivekbsworld · 1 month

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Driving Delights: Exploring with Car Rentals Calicut

Nestled on the serene shores of the Malabar Coast, Calicut, also known as Kozhikode, beckons travelers with its rich history, vibrant culture, and stunning natural landscapes. From exploring ancient temples to strolling along pristine beaches, the city offers a plethora of attractions waiting to be discovered. While public transportation provides one way to get around, renting a car in Calicut offers unparalleled freedom and flexibility to explore at your own pace. In this blog, we’ll delve into the world of car rentals in Calicut, providing insights and tips to ensure a smooth and memorable journey through this captivating city.

Convenience and Accessibility: Renting a car in Calicut offers travelers the ultimate convenience and accessibility. Whether you’re arriving at Calicut International Airport or seeking to explore the city’s hidden gems, having your own vehicle eliminates the hassle of waiting for taxis or relying on public transportation schedules. With a rental car at your disposal, you have the freedom to create your own itinerary and explore Calicut and its surrounding areas at your leisure.

Diverse Range of Vehicles: Car rental agencies in Calicut offer a diverse range of vehicles to cater to every traveler’s needs and preferences. Whether you’re traveling solo, with family, or in a group, you’ll find an array of options, including compact cars, sedans, SUVs, and even luxury vehicles. Additionally, many rental agencies provide add-on features such as GPS navigation systems, child seats, and roadside assistance to enhance your driving experience and ensure a comfortable journey.

Exploring Beyond the City Limits: One of the biggest advantages of renting a car in Calicut is the opportunity to explore beyond the city limits. With your own vehicle, you can venture into the picturesque countryside, visit nearby attractions, and embark on scenic drives along coastal roads or through lush greenery. Whether it’s witnessing the breathtaking sunset at Kappad Beach or exploring the tranquil backwaters of Kozhikode, renting a car opens up a world of possibilities for exploration and adventure.

Tips for Renting a Car in Calicut: To make the most of your car rental experience in Calicut, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Book in Advance: To ensure availability and secure the best rates, it’s advisable to book your rental car in advance, especially during peak travel seasons or holidays.

Understand Rental Terms and Conditions: Before signing the rental agreement, carefully review the terms and conditions, including insurance coverage, fuel policy, and any additional fees or charges.

Inspect the Vehicle: Thoroughly inspect the rental car for any pre-existing damage and ensure that all features and amenities are in working order before driving off. Take note of any scratches, dents, or issues and inform the rental agency to avoid disputes upon return.

Plan Your Itinerary: Take the time to plan your itinerary and identify the attractions you wish to visit. Consider factors such as distance, driving time, and road conditions to ensure a smooth and enjoyable journey.

Conclusion: In conclusion, renting a car in Calicut offers travelers the freedom, flexibility, and convenience to explore this enchanting city and its surrounding areas at their own pace. With a diverse range of vehicles to choose from and the opportunity to venture off the beaten path, renting a car opens up a world of possibilities for unforgettable adventures in Calicut. So why wait? Rent a car, hit the road, and embark on an unforgettable journey through the cultural and natural wonders of Calicut.

#Car rental #car rental calicut #Luxury Car Rental Companies in Kerala #premium cars for rent in trivandrum #rent-a-car #transportation #travel #Travel tips

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calacuspr · 1 year

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How to build a brand for a new football team

Most Arsenal fans know who Peter Wood is – even if they’re not aware of it.

‘Pedro’ as he goes by, runs one of the most successful Arsenal blogs ‘Le Grove’ and the Arsenal Opinion podcast.

But he has rarely watched a game in person in recent years after taking up the opportunity to move to New York to follow his dreams in the advertising world.

You could say that it has worked out well for him, winning more than 100 awards that have established him as a major player in the advertising world.

So perhaps it came as a surprise that he would leave the bright lights of the Big Apple and the advertising world behind to move to Missouri and the city of St Louis, to take up a role as the Vice President of Content for St. Louis City SC, a brand new Major League Soccer (MLS) team , bringing together his expertise in marketing with his passion for football.

Peter’s journey to St Louis came through one of his advertising clients, Enterprise Rent-a-car, which also took him to New York in the first place. After six years, a meeting with his client Lee Broughton, who was a senior marketing executive at the company and part of the family who founded Enterprise, led to discussions about the plans for St Louis.

“Growing up going to the football with my dad and my extended Arsenal family, it doesn’t matter what the score is, right? It’s just being together and you learn so much as a kid going to football.

“The idea that I could help craft that experience with all of the amazing people that work here was just something that doesn’t come around very often. There aren’t too many new clubs that pop up, so to be here from the start was the attraction.”

The decision was made to create a new soccer club in the heart of the city with training facilities and a new model that differs from most others in the MLS, who officially granted the city an expansion franchise in 2019.

The founder group includes the Taylor Family, led by patriarch Andy Taylor, and Jim Kavanaugh with Carolyn Kindle the first female President and CEO of a MLS team, which notably is also the first majority female-ownership group.

St Louis has a fine soccer tradition, providing almost half of the 1950 World Cup team who famously beat England and plenty of international players since – but the city never had its own professional team.

“Research had shown that St Louis could be quite down on itself for a whole number of historical reasons, while people in other cities didn’t have an opinion or know anything about it.

Peter added: “St Louis really is a soccer city: they absolutely love the sport. When you’re driving through the highways and you look over at the fields, it’s soccer goals everywhere. We’ve got 22,500 seats in the stadium and 70,000 ticket deposits were put down, so there’s a there’s a huge demand for soccer.

“The mission of the club is to make people pay attention to what's going on in St Louis and to help regenerate downtown. It's not about how many T-shirts can you sell or how we can make a big profit on this.

“It's a gift to the city and we hope it's going to be one part of a regeneration project that will bring new business to downtown and give people in the city a feeling of increased pride.”

Peter’s role focuses on managing fan engagement, ranging from content creation to marketing, the fans’ singing section within the stadium and even the e-sports team, who just won their first MLS Cup.

With football still a challenger sport in the US, Peter’s role is to keep fans interested even when things are not going so well on the field.

He added: “We are really focused on the bigger picture than just soccer, because a lot of clubs focus on what happens between the lines in 90 minutes and that's great if you're doing well. But if you're not doing well, people can switch off. People here don't generally understand British sports fandom being your birth right, where you don't have a choice in who you support and you pass it down to your kids.

“In England, it doesn’t matter how badly a club treats you or how awful the product is on the pitch, you're going to turn up with your friends, your family every week and you all sit there, because that’s what we’ve done for 140 years.

“In America, it's a bit different. We've got baseball, we've got hockey, so to get eyeballs and to get love in this town like we really have to work hard for it, we have to show fans that we are in the community, that we care about their opinions and integrate their good ideas into the fabric of the club.

“For instance, many clubs have a pay-to-play model where you pay a lot of money to go to an Academy and that takes a lot of people out of the system. So our ownership decided that they were going to break that model and we created a programme called City Futures which teaches kids about the beautiful game and also how to be better people. The focus is on the kids having fun, giving everyone a chance to taste what it’s like to be a part of soccer.”

Premier League clubs in England are finding out the hard way that fans will not turn up and pay big money for their second-rate food with little more than big screens, and St Louis are also utilising local cuisine to bring the fans in earlier.

Fans were asked which local restaurants they wanted to see in the stadium which resulted in over 8,000 submissions and 25 local experiences being integrated into the stadium. The impact of this approach is smaller queues in the stadium at bottleneck moments, and it encourages fans to arrive early because there’s always something new to try that is authentically St Louis.

FootyScran, the popular football food review account on Twitter recently saw 1.2 million views for the St Louis pork steak sandwiches.

Peter explained: “We've also been trying to integrate local culture into our stadium, to make it feel like a stadium for everybody. So we've got a programme called CITY BLOCK PARTY which uses the stadium as a platform for new music, bringing in local artists.

“Everybody has loved the vibe and it gave people a little bit of pride: this is our city; this is our food; this is our music. The Premier League could take this approach but it’s hard to change entrenched pregame behaviours that have lasted generations. We have had the opportunity to start afresh and create the tradition.”

St Louis has established a number of commercial partnerships with brands such as Purina, BJC Healthcare, Moneta and Cisco, and has an innovative agreement with banking sponsor Together Credit Union called the ‘Saves for Savings’ initiative which sees a new US$300 savings account opened for a local student for every save made by club captain and goalkeeper Roman Bürki.

With such a diverse and interesting range of stories to tell, it’s no wonder that content creation comes easily.

Peter added: “The real focus in year one is to land the plane with the fans and hope that what happens on the pitch brings more excitement to the city.

“The sponsorship team work very closely with us because they know the job that we're trying to do is to build the brand in the first few years. Everything is very intentional and thought through.

“We smashed the MLS record for kits sold and the Adidas CEO for North America thanked our ownership for driving so much additional revenue. So it's the town that has really taken to the sport. We're very lucky to have that passion and our job is to maintain it. How do we keep people feeling engaged in the club and how do we make them feel that this is their club.

“We're working with such a simple construct – would this idea make someone from outside of St Louis pay attention? Yes, OK. We're good to go. So it just makes everything a lot simpler. It's nice to work in a club that values doing things the right way rather than the easy way. Doing things the right way is the hard way nine times out of 10 and they pay off in the end.

“The more economic impacts of what we're doing like are more people going into downtown, are new businesses setting up, are their new hotels in the region, are businesses thriving and can this be the catalyst to regenerate a downtown that's needed a bit of love over the last 20-30 years.”

MLS has also benefited from a broadcast partnership with Apple, who provide a dedicated app and streaming service for fans to consume content, which has transformed exposure of the teams and competition.

With a central broadcasting deal rather than local agreements and a simple subscription, as well as via a television, fans can watch games, receive scores or written updates via an app on their phone.

Peter explained: “We're getting the real Apple treatment. They spend a lot of time with us because they want to make this the best possible, and it's been a really good start so far.

“Our social metrics have been through the roof and we've already gone past some of the more recent teams who've entered as franchises. Our engagement numbers tick upwards and our merchandise sales have been getting better and better.

“The clubs create the content and we’re like a media platform. We’ve just created a three-part documentary with Rafa Honigstein that's going to go up very soon. We’ve got origin stories and comeback stories as well.

“We track all of the numbers like we know how engaged fans are, we know how often that opening the app, we can track when they get into the stadium, what they purchase. So there are lots of ways to track the success and the overall sentiment of fans.“

St Louis made a great start to their inaugural season as well, winning their first three games to put a marker down that they won’t be the whipping boys of the MLS Western Conference.

“Everybody's very focused on the sporting side, so we’re feeling very confident that all the predictions that we were going to finish 14th are off,” Peter said.

“It's fun and I’m in a privileged position. I don't feel like it's a job because I love football. Every meeting I go into is like some sort of experience I've had on the other side. It's been better than I could have imagined, and a lot of that is driven by the ownership group that I work with.

“They're principled people, they want to do what's best for the local community and they want to give St Louis the pedestal that it deserves. They want to elevate the city and have a clear mission.

“It's been a great project and I feel blessed that I've got to work on it.”

#St Louis City #MLS #Apple #Le Grove #Missouri #Arsenal #Enterprise #rent-A-Car #US Soccer #Premier League #Rafa Honigstein

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jimjakk · 1 year

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Driving in Loops to Enterprise

"For a long time I believed if you drove the actor’s maroon luxury vehicle, you’d become the moon yourself, at long last a god you believed in." #Poem: "Driving in Loops to Enterprise"

We cruised Penn Avenue as compliant vagabonds to the parking garage train station to deposit/withdraw rental cars in other people’s names. For a long time I believed if you drove the actor’s maroon luxury vehicle, you’d become the moon yourself, at long last a god you believed in. Being one who has to drive it to where it must go, I know by now you will guide its hand back to beneath the famous…

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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mebtlog · 4 months

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MSBELEKRENTACAR - GOLD

Belek'te Araçları Güvenle Kiralayın

Belek, Türkiye'nin turizm cenneti olan Antalya'nın incisi konumunda bulunmaktadır. Bu muhteşem bölgeyi keşfetmek ve unutulmaz bir tatil deneyimi yaşamak isteyenler için, araç kiralama hizmetleri büyük önem taşır. İşte tam da bu noktada devreye giren MS Belek Rent a Car, Belek ve çevresinde araç kiralama konusunda güvenilir ve kaliteli hizmet sunarak müşterilerinin ihtiyaçlarını karşılar.

Geniş Araç Filosu:

MS Belek Rent a Car, her türlü ihtiyaca uygun geniş bir araç filosuna sahiptir. Ekonomik sınıftan lüks sınıfa, SUV'lerden minibüslere kadar birçok seçenek sunar. Müşteriler, tatil planlarına ve kişisel tercihlerine en uygun aracı seçme imkanına sahiptir.

Güvenilir ve Uygun Fiyatlar:

Belek rent a car, müşterilerine güvenilir ve uygun fiyatlarla hizmet sunar. Şeffaf fiyat politikasıyla, gizli ücretlerden kaçınır ve müşterilerine bütçelerine uygun seçenekler sunar. Ayrıca, cazip indirim ve kampanyalarla müşterilerin memnuniyetini sağlar.

Esnek Kiralama Şartları:

MS Belek Rent a Car, müşterilerine esnek kiralama şartları sunar. Günlük, haftalık veya aylık kiralama seçenekleriyle, müşterilerin tatil planlarına ve ihtiyaçlarına uygun seçenekler sunar. Ayrıca, ek sürücü ve sigorta seçenekleriyle daha güvenli ve konforlu bir kiralama deneyimi sağlar.

Belek ve çevresinde araç kiralama ihtiyacınızı karşılamak için MS Belek Rent a Car, güvenilir ve kaliteli hizmet anlayışıyla ön plana çıkmaktadır. Geniş araç filosu, uygun fiyatlar ve esnek kiralama şartları ile müşterilerine en iyi deneyimi sunmayı hedefler. Tatilinizi daha özgür ve keyifli hale getirmek için MS Belek Rent a Car web sitesini ziyaret ederek rezervasyon yapabilirsiniz.

#Belek #Rent a car #Rent a Car #Car #Antalya

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suncaptor · 2 months

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Been trying to not bother anyone, but I am wondering if anyone could send donations. I can't pay rent today (even if I pay the half I will on credit) and more fees are adding on, and outside of some help I've barely been eating for a long time here. I'm just struggling to afford rising costs of living with constant new crises happening, and I haven't been able to get someone to take over my lease, so I can't just couchsurf. Not at all asking anyone to over extend or send me more if they've had, but if anyone could help I'd appreciate it.

(I have seen as many case managers and financial aid advisors as I can and am using every resource I can too! There's just not much where I am now.)

Paypal suncaptor

Revolut remsun

#incoherents #desperately trying to get my bank to let me use a virtual credit card to pay credit but failing 😔😔 i am just so tired of living insecurity #soooo grateful to anyone who's helped me though even if i haven't been able to use it to fix everything it matters 🙏🙏#i wish that someone hadnt stolen my car fr #and that my apartment complex wasnt evil #things are bad #schedule #for right before my rent fees go through the roof😬😬#q

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briarpatch-kids · 2 months

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18-21 is like the middle school of adulthood. Truly the Worst

#nobody respects you #you dont have full rights and cant rent a car or have decent credit yet #you work a shit job usually #just fucking SUCKS

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vivekbsworld · 1 month

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Cruise Through Calicut: Car Rental Services in Kozhikode

Nestled along the pristine shores of Kerala’s Malabar Coast, Kozhikode, also known as Calicut, is a city steeped in history, culture, and natural beauty. From its bustling markets and ancient temples to its serene beaches and lush countryside, Kozhikode offers a treasure trove of experiences waiting to be discovered. And what better way to explore this captivating city than by renting a car and hitting the road on your own terms? car rental Kozhikode provide travelers with the freedom and flexibility to navigate the city and its surrounding areas at their own pace. Whether you’re a solo adventurer, a family on vacation, or a group of friends seeking new experiences, renting a car opens up a world of possibilities. Here are just a few reasons why car rental services are the ideal choice for exploring Kozhikode:

Convenience: With car rental services conveniently located at the airport, railway station, and various city center locations, travelers can easily pick up their vehicle upon arrival and start their exploration of Kozhikode without delay. Say goodbye to waiting for taxis or relying on public transportation—renting a car puts you in control of your journey from the moment you arrive.

Flexibility: One of the biggest advantages of renting a car is the flexibility it offers. Whether you want to spend the day leisurely exploring the historic landmarks of Kozhikode, embark on a scenic drive along the coastal stretch, or venture into the lush countryside to discover hidden gems, having your own transportation allows you to tailor your itinerary to suit your interests and preferences.

Comfort and Privacy: Renting a car provides travelers with the comfort and privacy they need to enjoy their journey to the fullest. Say goodbye to crowded buses and noisy trains—traveling in the comfort of your own vehicle allows you to relax, unwind, and soak in the beauty of Kozhikode at your own pace.

Access to Remote Destinations: While Kozhikode has plenty to offer within the city limits, some of the region’s most stunning attractions lie off the beaten path. Renting a car gives you the freedom to explore remote villages, scenic viewpoints, and lesser-known beaches that may be inaccessible by public transportation.

Cost-Effective: Contrary to popular belief, renting a car in Kozhikode can be a cost-effective option, especially for travelers exploring with family or friends. With the ability to split the cost of the rental and fuel, renting a car allows you to enjoy the convenience of having your own transportation without breaking the bank.

Whether you’re planning a weekend getaway, a cultural excursion, or a beach retreat, car rental services in Kozhikode provide the perfect solution for your travel needs. With convenience, flexibility, and the freedom to explore at your own pace, renting a car unlocks a world of possibilities and ensures an unforgettable adventure in this charming coastal city.

So why wait? Book your car rental in Kozhikode today and embark on a journey of discovery through the vibrant streets, historic landmarks, and breathtaking landscapes of this enchanting destination. With a rental car at your disposal, the possibilities are endless, and the adventure begins the moment you hit the road.

#budget-travel #Car rental #Car Rental in Kozhikode #Luxury Car Rental Companies in Kerala #premium cars for rent in trivandrum #rent-a-car #self drive car rentals in trivandrum @lowest price #travel #Travel tips

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heatherstyles · 2 months

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The fact that Klaus, the strongest creature to exist in TVDU was obsessed over Caroline, a baby vampire that couldn’t stand him at all and told him right in his face that he’s a loser and she’s beyond his lame and cheesy pickup lines is why i will never shut up about them. He chases after her right after they have a little spat and almost gets hit by a car?? like a million year old vampire like him cared so much about her he paid zero mind to his surroundings?? like no you don’t understand he wasn’t distracted by her, he was CONSUMED.

Thank you for listening to my TedTalk

#nat rambles #klaroline #of course i won’t stop talking about this superior ship #klaus is actually just a hopeless romantic softie #caroline is THE MAN here #they live rent free in my mind #klaus almost getting hit by a car is hilarious #the end of my tedtalk

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